An “incredibly rare” deathbed confession on an 18th-century robber, written just before he was “hanged” for stealing the Yarmouth Post and detailing his enlightened response to a failed gay seduction, was acquired by the Horsham Museum.
The Life of Thomas Munn, pseudonym, Gentleman Brick-Maker, pseudonym, Tom the Smuggler has 24 pages and was printed in 1750. It is part of the once popular genre of deathbed confessions, a precursor to true crime and supposed to be an autobiography delivered by Munn to the Yarmouth jailer on the morning of his execution on April 6, 1750.
The pamphlet, which would have been sold for pennies by street vendors, details Munn’s life of smuggling, theft and “pranks”, revealing how he became a life of crime after growing up in Kent in a family of brick makers. He later went to Sussex to become a dance master, writing about how he “got a group of Young Fellows as inconspicuous as me … to go with me to dance Morris, as he is called in that county”. This is, said Horsham Museum, one of the first documented references to morris dance.
Munn was back making bricks about three years later, at one point telling how he “marched” to Horsham to find a potential wife. The woman, Munn reveals, was a wealthy 70-year-old widow: “I immediately noticed that poor old Alma could not bite me, because she didn’t have a tooth on her head, which made her kiss soft.” A local lawyer is also running for her hand in marriage, and Munn gives up his case after the lawyer visits the widow, and she “went up stairs with him and seemed to have been around long enough to try a case.” “A very unfortunate game,” he notes.
The Horsham Museum said that what puts the pamphlet above the usual deathbed confessions “is the degree to which Thomas was self-conscious and reflective about his life.” He describes an incident at a Southampton inn, when the innkeeper’s son joined Munn in his bed, informing him that “I love to lie with a naked man”.
“He didn’t stay long in bed, but he started playing such a contradictory part to nature that I started in bed, he wanted words to express my confusion, surprise and passion, in his propositions,” says Munn. The “comrade” leaves after Munn threatens him with a pocketknife and gives “many excuses” the next day.
As Munn says: “It was what I never encountered before or since, but I had enough Philosophy in me to think that it would be a shame to expose a young man, even though he pointed to a very hideous sin; and certainly we, who commit crimes beyond the ordinary, must be pitiable, for no man is certain that if he comes under the same temptation, he will be able to resist it ”.
Horsham Museum curator Jeremy Knight said it was notable that Munn had this reaction, and that he also decided to make a public account of it.
“To make room for his confession – the only space he had to make a public account of himself – is really interesting,” he said. “The printer could also have been offended and not included – after all, the author would have had no recourse … However, they both found it important enough to tell. And what Munn says is that, although he is seen as a sin, his immediate reaction was conditioned by his education and social norms. He is not as sure as he was awakened by the boy, and who are we to judge when we have this reaction? A desire for tolerance and acceptance – it is human nature. “
Justin Croft, a British bookseller who found the pamphlet at an auction in the United States and bought it before selling it to the museum, called it “an interesting reflection on queerness.
“In some ways, it is a typical deathbed criminal confession – there were hundreds of them at the time,” he said. “But this type of strange episode is unusual. It is not something that I have noticed in one of these before. It’s a mistake – he’s saying it happened, I did what I did, but don’t blame me because you would be able to resist under the same circumstances? “
The Horsham Museum acquired the booklet, which only exists in four libraries around the world, with the help of Friends of National Libraries. It will display it in a new gallery when it reopens in the summer.